Upcoming Municipal Elections

By Mike Roussos

Many of us have been worrying about what to do about the forthcoming Municipal Elections. The collapse of public services is undeniable – but what does this mean for the way forward?

The easy answer is to throw out the useless bunch in charge – and replace them! But as we all know, it’s not that simple – for a host of reasons.

Service delivery shouldn’t be a political issue – we just need reliable Water and Electricity and Refuse collection and Roads that aren’t collapsing and Robots that work and Traffic police who tame the chaos on our roads etc etc.

But can we bring ourselves to vote for people who might be able to fix some of that stuff – but who are really quite dodgy about a host of other things we care about?
On the other hand, can we keep voting for people who have the same values and ideas (broadly) but don’t seem to be able to keep the lights on or the water flowing?

Why is this happening and (to bring it close to home) why is Johannesburg busy collapsing around us?

Some of us have been discussing this anxiously and eventually I undertook to write some articles about it – not about who to vote for and why – but about why our current services and structures (in Joburg specifically) are such a mess.

The idea being that regardless of who we end up putting into power in Joburg, they had better fix some of the things that are contributing to destroying our city.

A discussion about some of these structures and what they should look like and how they should work – may make it easier for us to tell those we are thinking of voting for – make sure you fix XYZ so that our city works better!

Please pass this article around as widely as you can – and let’s debate this stuff – so that we can demand specifics of those we vote for – so that we can tell them exactly what we expect them to do – and thus be able to control those we put in positions of power locally.